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Abstract Jude the Obscure Is Not Only Thomas Hardy's Last but Probably

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Abstract Jude the Obscure Is Not Only Thomas Hardy's Last but Probably “JOSEPH THE DREAMER OF DREAMS”: JUDE FAWLEY’S CONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY IN THOMAS HARDY’S JUDE THE OBSCURE STEFAN HORLACHER Abstract Jude the Obscure is not only Thomas Hardy’s last but probably also his bleakest novel. Even the epigram on the frontispiece – “The letter killeth [but the spirit giveth life]” – can be read as having negative forebodings; it can, however, also be interpreted as a commentary on the “nature” of language and on the absolute necessity of understand- ing its founding mechanisms such as absence, difference and deferral if one is to lead a happy and meaningful life and if one endeavors to claim the freedom and the responsibility to construct one’s gender identity. This essay thus centers on the extent to which Hardy’s pro- tagonist Jude Fawley, a man who desperately clings to the illusion of a transcendental signified, is able to understand and put into practice Hardy’s epigram when constructing his masculinity. Therefore, the focus of inquiry will be the hitherto largely neglected discursive con- struction of an ill-fated male gender identity in a discursive universe where “nobody did come, because nobody does” and where taking words literally has lethal consequences. It is certainly surprising that a closer look at the hundreds of articles, essays and monographs about Jude the Obscure reveals that most of these publications tend to ignore the eponymous hero of the novel and concentrate instead on Sue Bridehead, “perhaps the most remarkable feminine portrait in the English novel”.1 One eminent critic, Mary 1 Frank Rodney Southerington, Hardy’s Vision of Man, London: Chatto and Windus, 1971, 145. © Stefan Horlacher, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299009_009 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.Stefan Horlacher - 9789004299009 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:03:41PM via free access 142 Stefan Horlacher Jacobus, even speaks of “Sue the Obscure”,2 and in a letter Thomas Hardy himself called his novel “the Sue story”.3 Given this evident neglect of, or even discrimination against, the male protagonist in Hardy studies, it seems appropriate to shift the focus of critical atten- tion. Not, however, back to the humanist phallic and integrated self,4 but to a male gender identity which is insecure, fractured and fraught with problems. Considering the norms and social codes of the nineteenth century, there can be no doubt that Jude Fawley leads a very unconventional and even progressive life. In contrast to a character such as Michael Henchard in the Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude appears to consist of a complex blend of traditionally male and female attributes and contin- ues to seek a semblance of security throughout his life in a world which clearly “has become unmoored from natural certitude” and in which “to the unappeased spirit in search of articulate paradigms, nothing – not even the body’s native stresses – can be reliably catego- rized”.5 Lured primarily by the enigmatic Sue Bridehead, Jude is propelled into a kind of obscurity which renders his identity as well as his sexu- ality highly problematic. If this is an extremely unhappy situation for Hardy’s male protagonist, it does have the advantage that it puts the reader in a position first to realize and then to further explore the fact that “all labels that ‘ticket’ a person, especially the most common ones 6 of gender and class, are false”. 2 Mary Jacobus, “Sue the Obscure”, Essays in Criticism, XXV/3 (July 1975), 305. 3 Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, Brighton: Harvester, 1982, 138. 4 See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London: Routledge, 1990, 8. 5 Philip M. Weinstein, The Semantics of Desire: Changing Models of Identity from Dickens to Joyce, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, 139. See also: “Life is a something foreign to the classificatory demands made by the spirit. In its utterances, its values, and even its bodily grounding, life is a phenomenon of stain, illogic [sic], and obscurity” (ibid., 139). 6 Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Introduction, in The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspec- tives on Hardy, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993, 4. Stefan Horlacher - 9789004299009 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:03:41PM via free access Construction of Masculinity in Jude the Obscure 143 Applying traditional male and female stereotypes,7 there can be lit- tle doubt that the two main protagonists in Jude the Obscure are char- acterized by an odd combination of what Linda Dowling calls “male effeminacy and female mannishness”.8 The overriding consensus in the secondary literature is that “Sue assumes the attitudes of the deci- sive Victorian male”, while “Jude appears to take on the qualities of the submissive Victorian wife”.9 And in Hardy’s novel, Jude is indeed depicted as “a ridiculously affectionate fellow”,10 as “thin-skinned”, “horribly sensitive”11 and as the born victim; he even complains about being a man and is looking for a partner on whom “he can lean on and look up to”.12 In the following, I do not intend to offer yet another analysis of male and female stereotypes, which Hardy’s novel effectively ques- tions and transgresses anyway, but shall instead adopt a psycho- analytically inspired masculinity studies approach before asking to what extent Jude’s failure is caused by his desperate clinging to the illusion of a transcendental signified, and in particular by a defective understanding of writing. Masculinity studies and the discursive construction of identity Although there has been an increase in interest in masculinity studies during the last decades,13 work on masculinity is still an almost negli- 7 See Doris Grimm-Horlacher, Weiblichkeitsmuster und Geschlechtsrollenstereotype im Spätwerk von D.H. Lawrence: The Plumed Serpent, Fantasia of the Unconscious und Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, St Ingbert: Röhrig, 2002, 42-58. 8 Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890’s”, Nineteenth- Century Fiction, XXXIII/4 (March 1979), 445. 9 Anne Z. Mickelson, Thomas Hardy’s Women and Men: The Defeat of Nature, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1976, 5. 10 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895), ed. Dennis Taylor, London: Penguin Classics, 1998, 85 (all quotations from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure are from this edition). 11 Ibid., 286. 12 Mickelson, Thomas Hardy’s Women and Men, 138. 13 See Stefan Horlacher, “Charting the Field of Masculinity Studies: or, Toward a Literary History of Masculinities”, in Constructions of Masculinity in British Litera- ture from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Stefan Horlacher, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 3-18; Stefan Horlacher, “Überlegungen zur Theoretischen Konzep- tion Männlicher Identität: Ein Forschungsüberblick mit Exemplarischer Vertiefung”, in “Wann ist die Frau eine Frau?” – “Wann ist der Mann ein Mann?”: Konstruktio- nen von Geschlechtlichkeit von der Antike bis ins 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Stefan Horla- Stefan Horlacher - 9789004299009 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:03:41PM via free access 144 Stefan Horlacher gible quantity in comparison to the amount of research being done on women and femininity in the field of gender studies. What Peter F. Murphy argued twenty years ago is, at least to a certain degree, still valid today: men are only just beginning “to articulate a critical analy- sis of masculinity in contemporary culture and in modern literature. More recent, and sometimes more radical, books have been written by sociologists, psychologists, and historians, not literary or cultural crit- ics.”14 If we leave aside the more sociologically oriented branch of mas- culinity studies and concentrate on approaches inspired by deconstruc- tion, post-Freudian psychoanalysis and discourse analysis, we have to state that the majority of these studies support the approach that male as well as female gender identities are to be thought of as subject posi- tions and as relational, performative and linguistic constructs. Howev- er, if gender identities are subject to the structures of language, this does not necessarily mean that they are totally bereft of any possibility of agency or that the body becomes irrelevant. Whereas medical research has demonstrated that bodies are not al- ways unambiguously sexed and that one should probably speak of a continuum and not of a dichotomy as far as femininity and masculini- ty are concerned15 cultural anthropology makes clear that bodies are always gendered and that this gendering is oriented towards the crea- tion or exaggeration of difference.16 If there is no denying that there is a body, we can, as Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler and others have cher, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2010, 195-238; Susan Bassnett and Gisela Ecker, Editorial, in Journal for the Study of British Cultures, III/2 (1996), 100. 14 Peter F. Murphy, “Introduction: Literature and Masculinity”, in Fictions of Mascu- linity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities, ed. Peter F. Murphy, New York: New York University Press, 1994, 4. 15 See Stefan Horlacher, “Men’s Studies and Gender Studies at the Crossroads (I): Überlegungen zum aktuellen Stand von Geschlechterforschung und Literaturwissen- schaft”, Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, XXXVII/2 (2004), 169-88; Stefan Horlacher, “Men’s Studies and Gender Studies at the Crossroads (II): Transdis- ziplinäre Zukunftsperspektiven der Geschlechterforschung”, Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, XXXVII/3 (2004), 267-86; Karin Christiansen, “Biologische Grund- lagen der Geschlechterdifferenz”, in Konstruktion von Geschlecht, eds Ursula Pasero and Friederike Braun, Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1995, 15; Wolfgang Mertens, “Männlichkeit aus psychoanalytischer Sicht”, in Wann ist der Mann ein Mann? Zur Geschichte der Männlichkeit, eds Walter Erhart and Britta Herrmann, Stuttgart: Metz- ler, 1997, 45; R.W. Connell, Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity, 1995, 21-22, 46-47. 16 See David D. Gilmore, Mythos Mann: Rollen, Rituale, Leitbilder, Munich: Artemis und Winkler, 1991, 25.
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